Chartbook 463: Zauberberg/Magic Mountain - how history ended in Davos ... on, or about September, 1907.

We are in a moment of historical transition. It makes sense to look to history for orientation. And, in particular, it makes sense to look to great works of literature for deep insight.

But both moves, as much sense as they make, come with a catch.

Good history may negate itself. If one emphasizes discontinuity and radical change, as one surely must in modern history, the “lesson”, such as it is, may amount to little more than “expect the unexpected”.

And literature comes with its own pitfalls.

The novel is a genre deeply intertwined with the emergence, in the Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, of modern historical consciousness and modern historical writing. In its very mode of narration and assumptions about shared time and imagined community between characters, writer and audience, the novel form is indissolubly intertwined with classical modes of historical narrative. Novels at their best are richer and deeper in their “reality effect” than even the best and “thickest” archival histories can hope to be. The novelist is unfettered in their license to conjure character. Historians conjure character too and circumstance and scenario. But in so doing we are constrained by the sources, in the manner less of a scientist than a courtroom lawyer. We choose - it is a choice - to play the game within parameters defined by whatever the sources can reasonably be construed to “say”.

As contemporaries remarked at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, novels are intoxicating. But this too harbors deeper questions. One may enjoy the “common sense” realistic mode of narration, but, examined in depth the ideas of time and experience and historical logic that conventional narration relies on, reveal themselves to be slippery. A writer like Tolstoy was both obsessed with history and deeply skeptical of the conventional ways of writing it. By the early 20th century, under the impact of the radicalization of 19th-century thought - Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, early feminism - Europe and American novelists began to ask, what is history, what is time and what does a realistic narrative look like against this backdrop?

By the 1920s many authors had decided that only a far more fractured, multi perspectival approach could really claim the title of realism and avoid the jibe of pastiche. With stream-of-consciousness writing, character studies became whirlpools; realistic indeed, but sweeping the reader into vertiginous depths, rather than offering stable points of reference.

So, if history offers no easy lessons for the present, turning to the great monuments of the literary canon is no simple exercise either. In a new series of posts I want to take stock of and document my own experience in reading and thinking modern history through the literature that accompanied it.

I’ve already made various experiments in this direction - Grossman, Malaparte. I will come back them.

What is on my mind this weekend is Thomas Mann’s extraordinary global best-seller of the 1920s, Zauberberg, which appeared in German in 1924 and in English in 1927, as Magic Mountain.

By chance I started reading this monumental novel, which is set in a Sanatorium in Davos in the early 1900s, earlier this summer and it has framed the last two months. And not just mine.

In late June, in the “Cultural Coda” to his regular Podcast exchange with Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf invoked Mann directly:

Now my cultural coda … This week it’s a novel, and I think it, to me, it’s the most important novel of the 20th century, at least the most revealing. It’s Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which was published in 1924. And the ‘20s and ‘30s are a period I think more and more about. And the core of the book was the intellectual ferment going on in the first half of the 20th century, between old fashioned, stayed civilised liberal humanism embodied in this case in the figure of a man called Settembrini, putting forward the sort of views I hold and I’m beginning to feel are equally old-fashioned. And on the other hand, Naphta, who is a Marxist revolutionary, but actually when you push him, turns out to be very similar to the far-right revolutionaries, and really the difference between Hitler and Stalin turned out to pretty small when all things are done. And it gets you this sense of profound conflict. And Mann puts forward the idea that the first world war was the beginning of the destruction that followed from this. It was written during the war and published shortly afterwards. So it’s extraordinary how a book novel published 100 years ago can be so brilliant at describing the sort of things we are seeing right now and the sort of challenges we’re now seeing between pretty feeble, liberal, humanist type people and passionate authoritarians.

For Wolf, Zauberberg is a prompt to think about the crisis of liberal globalization. This makes sense in relation to the famous exchanges between the two characters Settembrini and Naphta. Settembrini is an advocate of liberal progress. Naphta a much darker figure who advocates for a more radical vision of modern history, which is both demanding and authoritarian and taps deeper and darker wells of human motivation.

The Settembrini-Naphta exchange is one thread running through a giant narrative. The exchange itself is profoundly inconclusive, ending with the suicide of one of the protagonists and the disruption of Sanatorium life by the abrupt and unanticipated shock of the July crisis of 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. As Brad Delong sagely remarks in commenting on Wolf’s evocation of Mann’s novel, when it comes to Zauberberg, things are often not what they seem.

At its core the Magic Mountain is a modernist wolf in traditional-narrative novel sheep’s clothing. Mann weaves together realism, irony, and symbolism, creating a text that is both accessible and endlessly interpretable. Things are what they appear to be. And then, again, they are not.

What is Zauberberg about? How does its form relate to its content? And how do both relate to the period in which it was composed and to our own present moment?

The answer to none of these questions is obvious. Everyone who has made their way through the novel, will have their own view, but most will agree that reading Zauberberg is itself an experiential shock. The book is so long and so “immersive”, it requires something akin to an attitudinal adjustment on the part of the reader. It is a “Bildungsroman” (a novel of character formation) also in this sense - the book reshapes its reader. Let there be no doubt about it, in reading this book you are embarking on a very German, very strange, “post-Wilhelminian” trip.

Part of the impact is from the writing. Mann’s prose is lengthy, not to say lugubrious. It is elegant enough to keep you going, but demanding and wordy. It is brilliantly descriptive, but would one say that Zauberberg is realistic? It would seem fairer to say that reality and perceptions of reality are constantly put in question. Mann doesn’t go for the dramatic shocks of magical realism. His style isn’t exactly surrealist. Nevertheless, Zauberberg is a novel that explores both the mundane flow and the outer edges of consciousness.

As with other novels of the period, interiority is key. Anyone expecting a panoramic account of early 20th century European society will be disappointed. The book is set far from “the world”, in Davos, which at the time was an emerging Swiss health and sport resort. The world of Davos itself is sketched rather than deeply developed. We spend more time with weather, the sunshine and snow and the bodies above all of the key protagonist, Hans Castorp.

Castorp is a young man from a distinguished Hamburg merchant family. At a young age he is orphaned and is drifting into a career as a maritime engineer, with little ambition or zeal, when feeling that “all is not entirely well”, before beginning regular work, he decides to take a summer break to visit his cousin who has been sent to Davos in the hope of recovering from what, at first, is a mild TB infection. The date is August 1907.

Following Castorp over the following seven to eight years, Mann take us inside the enclosed world of the sanatorium. He does not just describe this world, he immerses readers in its routines and habits. As Mann portrays it, the Sanatorium is an enclosed, increasingly hermetically sealed environment, with its own (bizarre) rules. So though this is a book about the world before 1914, it is precisely about the tendency of that world to spin off distinct segments that detach themselves from ongoing history, politics, geopolitics and economics. It is a book, you might say, about the modern world’s tendency to create “bubbles” and for modern temporality - the imagined community of simultaneity - to lose its binding coherence. If Mann’s book is a reflection on contemporary history it is so by way of a dramatized account of what in the early 1900s, it might have meant for history to have stopped.

In this sense, it seems to me a precursor of writing like that of J.G. Ballard. But whereas Ballard’s effects are psychological minimal and the style is “cool”. The interiority Mann gives us is deep and at times somewhat feverish.

Not for nothing, Mann dubbed Zauberberg a “Zeitroman”, not a Geschichtsroman, a romance of time not of history. The Berghof is an early 20th century end of history. All that remains for its inmates is an obsessive preoccupation with x-rays, exams, body temperature readings, food and flirtation.

This is both ridiculous and serious at the same time. The sanatorium, though it is satirized in many ways, is a place of medical business. Many of its patients are very ill and many die. Commentary on Zauberberg, as far as I can see, generally does not take TB and the resulting sense of mortality, seriously enough.

The sanatorium may be risible in many ways. TB was not.

Source: Our World in Data

If you strip back the satire to its harsh inner core, it is hard not to think of Mann’s sanatorium complex as part of an early 20th-century version of “risk society” (Beck). One way of making sense of the life of the Sanatorium is to think of it as an all-consuming struggle to understand, by any means necessary, the process of “consumption”. We read the book now in the safe knowledge that TB can be cured. Even in the mid century that was not the case. When Susan Sontag, amongst notable readers, first encountered Magic Mountain in the 1940s, she did so against the backdrop of having lost her own father to TB in 1939 and having spent her early childhood in Tucson Arizona, the US equivalent of Davos, trying to limit the impact of her asthma.

With the shadow of death hanging over them, the main impact of the Sanatorium on its patients is not so much to offer a cure as to progressively release them from any conventional understanding of time and to normalize the process of dying. This in itself has a structural logic. But the problem is, its affects everyone who is there, whether ill or not. The question is, who belongs and who does not? After all, we are all complex organisms constantly in motion towards death. We are all in various ways ill. The ironic undertone of the novel derives not from the serious business of TB, but from the fact that from the start the reader is left in little doubt that Hans Castorp himself, is not seriously ill. He is not well. After his initial three week stay he catches a cold and on examination by the doctors in September 1907, they claim to have heard some concerning noises. He seems to take to the sanatorium regime so he extends his stay. But what exactly is wrong with him and how illness and health, disease and vitality fit together, is precisely the mystery.

The remarkable success of the novel is that it “shows” rather than “tells” how Castorp increasingly falls under the spell of the medical regime. It is not just Castorp that loses his sense of time. Over the following thousand pages and seven years of story-time, the reader’s becomes fluid too. At several points Mann jokingly flattens the relationship between the reader, the imaginary protagonists and his narrator’s voice. Nine hundred pages in, Mann cheerily tells us, we have all lost track of the passage of time, none of us can any longer precisely remember who said what to whom, when. Indeed, in the framing preface, before you plunge in, Mann warns you that you should probably envision reading his giant novel at least twice. A few hundred pages in you realize that in making that suggestion Mann is positioning himself alongside the Sanatorium doctors in September 1907, who have found something wrong with Castorp and suggest that he indefinitely extend his stay. Between the body, the doctor and the patients consciousness, an unresolved drama plays out.

Should we even agree to this game?

When Mann himself visited his wife in Davos in 1912 and was at risk of getting caught up in the diagnostic regime, he ignored the doctor’s warnings and returned to real life. Should we do the same? Mann leaves us with the equivalent to a liar’s paradox. How can we trust an author who is both warning us about the loss of any meaningful sense of time and yet claiming so much of ours and then asking for more, promising even more insight, if only we spend more time with him.

Is this some kind of “Hotel Caifornia”? “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.

As far as realism is concerned you might say that Mann’s message is that it is, in fact, very difficult to be “realistic” about time. And if that is the case, then one of the two basic coordinates of our existence is in flux. Before you even get to the question of realism - how to depict the world - the first question is how we are “in the world” in the first place - the question of being. It may be apocryphal, but Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt are said to have enjoyed Zauberberg together. The release of the blockbuster novel coincided, in November 1924 with the beginning of their love affair. To see Zauberberg as part of the broader cultural backdrop for the success of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, certainly makes sense. In 1929 it was not by accident that Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer conducted their epochal debate on Western philosophy at a summer school held in … Davos!

Zauberberg truly was a novel that framed an epoch, at least in the Germanosphere.

For my own part, this summer I have found that reading Zauberberg in conjunction with Adorno’s lectures on History and Freedom makes for an excellent pairing. Adorno’s lectures may be from 1964/65, but they carry with them the aura of the 1920s and Adorno’s notoriously difficult German, in lecture mode, actually flows more smoothly than many of the lugubrious monologues in Zauberberg. In the 1940s, Mann and Adorno would find themselves as neighbors in Pacific Palisades. Hotel California, indeed!

But to return to Martin Wolf’s suggestion, if the “real world” of the early 20th century intrudes in Mann’s Davos other than through the struggle with TB, it is by way of the the debates between Castorp’s two “tutors”: Settembrini and Naphta .

As far as their TB is concerned, both are more or less hopeless cases. Neither expects to return to the flatlands. Beyond that, they represent to ends of a philosophical spectrum. Settembrini is a liberal, writing endless contributions to international committees for the improvement of the world. The other, Naptha, is a Jesuit who sees Communism as the future. He is, we are told, from a Jewish family that fled to Western Europe after Naphta’s father was crucified (sic) in a pogrom. Naphta too wants change, but insists that it must be won through struggle and discipline and subordination to bigger, more powerful institutions.

Both are caricatures. The accompanying text to the popular German edition I read literally dismisses them as “Schwätzer”. There is no doubt that Mann has a distanced relationship to both of them. And Castorp, as he gains in maturity and sophistication will position himself between the two. But to excise this part of the reading experience is to indulge in precisely the philistinism that Mann is putting in question.

The questions they are posing are meant seriously and Mann attempts a resolution of a kind. In one of the most dramatic passages, Castorp teaches himself to ski. But instead of using his new found mobility to join the throngs in the resort he sets out to more or less deliberately lose himself in the forest. When a snow storm blows up, it seems as though Castorp is in real trouble. As he slumps against the makeshift shelter of an abandoned barn, and drifts in and out of the awareness that he may be about to freeze to death, Mann takes us into Castorp’s delirious dreams. And it is precisely in this interior monologue of Castorp’s dream that Mann delivers the message of his sprawling opus:

Disease, health! Spirit, nature! Are those contradictions? I ask, are they problems? No, they are no problems, neither is the problem of their aristocracy. The recklessness of death is in life, it would not be life without it—and in the centre is the position of the Homo Dei, between recklessness and reason, as his state is between mystic community and windy individualism. I, from my column, perceive all this. In this state he must live gallantly, associate in friendly reverence with himself, for only he is aristocratic, and the counter-positions are not at all. Man is the lord of counterpositions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. More so than death, too aristocratic for death—that is the freedom of his mind. More aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and that is the piety in his heart. There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else. Death is a great power. One takes off one’s hat before him, and goes weavingly on tiptoe. He wears the stately ruff of the departed and we do him honour in solemn black. Reason stands simple before him, for reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire. Desire, says my dream. Lust, not love. Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful human intercourse—always in silent recognition of the bloodsacrifice. Ah, yes, it is well and truly dreamed. I have taken stock. I will remember. I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet well remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to humankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.—And with this—I awake.

And yet here too Mann is toying with us.

Castorp articulates this heroic vision of “man” as the “lord of counterpositions”, only in a state of what turns out be self-induced hallucinatory panic. As the weather lifts and he comes out of his daze he realizes that the entire episode lasted only fifteen minutes. He wasn’t actually freezing to death. By the evening he is safely back at home, enjoying dinner, the clarity of the fever dream gone, back to his usual befuddled state.

Meanwhile, Settembrini and Naphta, though their designated role is to bring the thunder of modern history into the novel, are both, themselves, “out of time”. Settembrini is a free mason and the descendant of Carbonari, a secret revolutionary sect in Italy in the early 19th century. In the early 1900s he is thoroughly of out place. And though Naphta is commonly taken to be a caricature of contemporary revolutionaries, perhaps even George Lukacs, he is himself a man looking back to the Middle Ages.

This is a handy map of Naphta’s sources for anyone who has German.

Source: Zeit Blog

When Castorp learns that Naphta is a Jesuit, having grown up in protestant North Germany he is honestly surprised that such a thing still exists. Mann makes great play of the fact that Naphta has his rooms decorated in grand, Papal style. Added to which, when the argument between Settembrini and Naphta escalates into a feud, it is “resolved” in a radically anachronistic style. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the effect.

To return to the overarching point, the novel may be set before the war, but the basic logic of the story is not to immerse us in the reality of that world, but, instead, to put everything including the critiques we are offered, at arms length.

By 1913/1914 - Mann does not give us the date but we can infer it - Castorp’s “education” is reaching its end. But the conclusion of this Bildungsroman is anything but satisfactory. In fact, Castorp is sliding increasingly into meaninglessness, obsessed with the card game of patience. Laying out one hand after another.

“Not precisely playing cards,” Hans Castorp told him (Settembrini). “I am just laying them out, to have a tussle with abstract chance. The tricks it plays intrigue me, it is as inconsistent as the wind. It fawns on you, and then suddenly puts up its back and won’t budge. This morning, directly I got up, it came three times running, once in two rows, which is a record. But will you believe it, this is the thirty-third time I have played it without once going even halfway through?” Herr Settembrini looked at him, as so often he had looked in the course of the years, with melancholy black eyes. “At all events, you are preoccupied,” he said. “It does not look as though I could find here the consolation I seek, nor balsam for my inward wound.” “Wound?” echoed Hans Castorp, laying afresh. “The world situation puzzles me,” the Freemason sighed. “The Balkan Federation will go through, Engineer, all the information I receive points that way. Russia is working feverishly for it. And the combination is aimed against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which must fall before any of the realized. You understand my scruples. Austria, as of course you are aware, I hate with all my strength. But shall I, on that account, lend support and countenance in my soul to the Sarmatian despotism, which is about to set the torch to the whole of our highly civilized continent? Yet on the other hand, diplomatic collaboration, to however small an extent, between my own country and Austria, I should regard as dishonourable. These are conscientious scruples which—” “Seven and four,” said Hans Castorp. “Eight and three. Knave, queen, king. It is coming out. You have brought me luck, Herr Settembrini.” The Italian was silent. Hans Castorp felt the black eyes, the eyes of reason and morality, bent in sorrow upon him. He played on for a while; then, resting his cheek in his hand, looked up at his mentor with the innocent, impenitent air of a naughty child. “Your eyes,” the master said, “vainly seek to hide the fact that you are conscious of your state.” “Placet experiri,” (it pleases to experiment) Hans Castorp was so pert as to reply to him. Herr Settembrini left; and the abandoned one sat long, at his table in the middle of his white room, his chin supported on his hand, and brooded; shuddering in the very core of him at the cross-purposes everything in the world had got into, at the grinning and grimacing of the demons and ape-headed gods into whose hands it had fallen, at their unbridled domination, the name of which was “The Great God Dumps.” An apocalyptic, evil name, calculated to give rise to mysterious fears. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and his heart with the flat of his hand. He was frightened. It seemed to him “all this” could come to no good, that a catastrophe was impending, that long-suffering nature would rebel, rise up in storm and whirlwind and break the great bond which held the world in thrall; snatch life beyond the “dead point” and put an end to the “small potatoes” in one terrible Last Day.

Castorp is saved, not by love or politics or science, but by music. Not live music, musical performance, let alone musical composition. That would not be in keeping with his modest post-historic character. You don’t go from laying patience to composing arias. What saves him is recorded music. A modern gramophone arrives in the Sanatorium - an excellent piece of German cultural technology - and Castorp is transfixed.

This second-order role - as an afficionado of recorded music, seems to me significant. Castorp does not play, let alone write music. He listens. He appreciates. He selects. He becomes a connoisseur of gramophone needles. Is this, the “greatest novel of the 20th century”, also the first in which the forsaken hero regains his sense of agency and self, by becoming a DJ?

Once again I was reminded of the end of history and this time of the famous footnote to Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel.

Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of being rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was able to conclude from this that the “American way of life” was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the “eternal present” future of all humanity. Thus, Man’s return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present.

It was following a recent voyage to Japan (1959) that I had a radical change of opinion on this point. There I was able to observe a Society that is one of a kind, because it alone has for almost three centuries experienced life at the “end of History”—that is, in the absence of all civil or external war (following the liquidation of feudalism by the roturier Hideyoshi and the artificial isolation of the country conceived and realized by his noble successor Yiyeasu). Now the existence of the Japanese nobles, who ceased to risk their lives (even in duel) and yet did not for that begin to work, was anything but animal.

“Posthistorical” Japanese civilization undertook ways diametrically opposed to the “American way.” No doubt, there were no longer in Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the “European” or “historical” sense of these words. But Snobbery in its pure form created disciplines negating the “natural” or “animal. . . . [I]n spite of persistent economic and political inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values— that is values empty of all “human content” in the “historical” sense.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. Raymond Queneau (New York: Basic Books, 1969): 161-162.

What after all is DJing, other than a particular articulation of taste, of refinement and “snobbery”.

In any case, the effect of the gramophone on Castorp’s state of mind is dramatic. He both loses himself in the music and comes back to himself.

But does this new journey lead to reality? Not in any simple sense.

As it turns out, Castorp’s command of the audio soundtrack allow him not just to revive his own spirits, but also to summon the ghostly apparition of his deceased cousin - his original reason for visiting the Sanatorium, who after discharging himself early to join his regiment, was forced to return and died horribly from TB of the trachea. Again there is general befuddlement. Is the apparation “real” or some kind of circus trick? True or not, Mann leave us in no doubt that Castorp is profoundly shaken. But yet again he refuses any solid conclusion. Castorp does not embrace his new-found spiritual powers. He slams out of the seance never to return. We hear no more about the music.

What ends the novel is nothing interior to it, but the intrusion of history with a capital H. Admittedly there are rumors for a hundred or so pages before the end. An increasingly acrimonious mood in the Sanatorium. Hints of news from the outside. But Castorp has long ago abandoned newspaper reading. When Settembrini tries to bring up matter of diplomacy, Castorp’s reaction is to go back to laying patience. He no longer keeps a calendar or even a pocket watch. Given the fickle weather in Davos, even the seasons blend into each other.

History truly is exogenous. And the ending is correspondingly “ragged”. There are hints of diplomatic maneuverings from Settembrini’s anxious reports. When the Sarajevo assassination happens, even the Sanatorium guests are shaken awake. And within a matter of days and a few pages, without the usual cogitation, without deep introspection Castorp breaks out of his sanatorium dream world. Perhaps the abruptness is the point. Mann gives us uncharacteristically little explanation.

Castorp leaves Settembrini - whose liberal Italian commitments will place him on the other side of the war - on the platform at Davos Dorf, waving good bye with a tear in his eye.

The point, if there is a point, is that if you live like Castorp, then history will happen to you.

As Trostsky is supposed to have said about war: You may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you.

Without segue, as the narrator announces that we are leaving Castorp behind, we see him, “for the last time”, charging forwards in a violent assault, in a brief but vivid evocation of the early border battles of 1914 - the so-called massacre of the innocents - in which tens of thousands of barely trained volunteers charged to their deaths.

In a world fit for the likes of Ernst Jünger and “Storms of Steel”, Hans Castorp is cannon fodder.

Mann himself had begun work on Zauberberg by the time war broke out. He soon abandoned it for more propagandistic activities. By the end of the war he was both alienated from his brother Heinrich Mann and much of the world’s literati and his entire worldview was in tatters. The crises of the Weimar Republic and notably the assassination of Walther Rathenau in June 1922 did the rest. In 1922 he came out as a supporter of the German Republic, one of the leading Vernunftrepublikaner - republicans of reason (as opposed to those who followed their passionate commitment to monarchism or fascism).

Zauberberg when it appeared in 1924, marks the first step in his transition to becoming a true global celebrity, one of the most vocal German bourgeois advocates of the Weimar Republic and, then, in exile in the 1930s, after his Nobel prize, one of the leading Atlanticist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Which other contemporaries does the figure of Thomas Mann and Zauberberg bring to mind?

For several days of pondering, I couldn’t put my finger on it. But then it clicked: …. I’ll tell you in Part II.

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